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This weekend I found myself having fun catching fireflies with the seven and under crowd while the adults hung out inside and talked and drank and laughed. Sometimes I find that I’m more comfortable with children than I am with people my own age. I think it may be that children aren’t afraid to ask certain questions about the world, and I don’t mind discussing those questions. Adults seldom have the patience for conversations that start with “Which bugs like it when you scream?” or “…he’s half Thing, half Superman, half Human Torch, half Iron Man, half Hulk, half Invisible Woman, and half Spider-Man.” I remember writing once, when I was in high school or college,

“Let me be a child forever. Then I’ll be ready.”

A few years after I wrote that, I thought the statement was made out of my desire to remain immature and avoid responsibility, but I realize again the spirit in which I first wrote those words. I’m at a point in my life at which I am comfortable and confident in my abilities as an adult (which is not to say that I don’t have room for improvement) AND I’m not ashamed to wonder about the world as a child would, even if it makes people at the party wonder if I’m having a good time. I really am having a good time.

To all you thirty-somethings worrying about how you wasted your twenties and what you’ll do to make up for it before you’re forty, know that there’s still time to live your life, and take some courage from these sage words of Carrie Bradshaw:

“Enjoy yourself . . . That’s what your twenties are for. Your thirties are to learn the lessons. Your forties are to pay for the drinks.”

I wrote this at a time when a large amount of responibility was suddenly thrust upon me by someone, and I was coping. Upon seeing these lyrics now, they seem harsh. Am I saying that I’m unreliable? Am I stepping out and saying I refuse all responsibility because I value my independence too much? And how much of that attitude do I carry with me today? Is it really immature to say “I want you to let me be me,” or is that a difficult but necessary requirement of stable adult living? And what about the imperative “Accept that there’s uncertainty”? Am I saying that I will never be a known quantity, essentially that I can’t be counted on, and that those close to me will just have to live with that. That hardly seems fair or mature. To what extent do I still feel that way, and to what extent do I use it as a defense mechanism – because that’s what I think it might be. I’m afraid I have a fear of failure, which leads to a fear of letting other people down, which I guard against by – in extreme circumstances – trying to keep others from counting on me in the first place. And maybe I disguise it all by asserting a right to “individuality,” which in this context is perhaps more accurately a disguised form of individualism.